Anti-Social Media: THE SOCIAL RECKONING

Conventional wisdom on 2010’s Facebook founding drama The Social Network says it’s David Fincher’s direction that makes it great. It's his camera and pacing and precise work with actors that gives it an ice cold framing and a speeding momentum and an endlessly quotable, densely characterized snappiness. But that really does short change screenwriter Aaron Sorkin’s contributions. Even on the page it’s one of the great films of this century. Next time you watch it keep an ear on the structure of the interleaving deposition timelines and the dimensionality of character and intent in each conversation. The movie’s complexity is enhanced by the direction, but the screenplay is the foundation that lets it reach those aims. It’s the mix of the two that makes magic. 

And it’s the lack of the two that leaves its new follow up, The Social Reckoning, feeling pretty flat. Sorkin directs his own writing here. He’ll never be mistaken for being as distinctive a director as he is a writer. Not a big surprise the new movie is typically flat and simply staged. Those are the aesthetic decisions, or lack thereof, you’d make if all you wanted to do was letting writing and performance take center stage. But what’s most surprising is how the writing falls short, too. For all his idiosyncratic tendencies, Sorkin can write verbal pyrotechnics as well as anyone. Here it’s all expositional with a light dusting of the chewy self-righteous monologues for which he’s best known. It’s thinner and more utilitarian, more interested in making its points than building its world. If the first film couldn’t go more than a couple minutes without a memorable line, building complicated characters through a hurtling startup story in action, this one’s mostly about people explaining things to each other when they aren’t clicking around. 

Founder Mark Zuckerberg is now a villain lurking in a subplot, caring more about preserving power and time users spend on his site than the social consequences of the platform he runs. He’s played by Jeremy Strong, a good substitution from the original’s Jesse Eisenberg, if only because Eisenberg can never totally remove likability, or at least easy charisma, from his screen persona. Strong plays him as a total blank cocooned from real pushback and warped by a core belief shaped by oppositional defiance. He takes any criticism as impetus to get even worse. If the earlier movie was about how one young man’s antisocial tendencies were inflicted upon the rest of us, the follow-up’s Reckoning is all about what’s happening to the rest of us 20 years on. This movie’s mainly about a whistleblower (Mikey Madison) contacting an investigative reporter (Jeremy Allen White) to raise alarm about internal studies that show harmful effects of Facebook and its assorted social media products. He asks questions. She sneaks documents. Repeat. Meanwhile Zuck preps for a senate hearing with the help of friendly (Wunmi Mosaku) and combative (Bill Burr) interlocutors. All the while, COVID and the January 6th riots loom in the near future as the movie cuts between 2019 and 2021. 

The movie’s not particularly equipped to do anything with all these potentially provocative and productive juxtapositions other than asserting that social media is a social ill. It so obviously is, and it is nice to rehearse the reasons why. We’ve hooked our society and our economy up to these machines that pump poison into the body politic, accelerating radicalization and bullying and the collapse of objective truth. That’s a project that happens to flatter certain would-be authoritarians in our corporate-political landscape. And it leaves the rest of us worse off. But despite this movie’s good intentions and research, the project doesn’t work as drama or as documentary. It’s a pleasantly mediocre hybrid, flattering the assumptions of people who walk in ready to be just as angry. And even they might be surprised how sedate and surface-level the results are here. 

Truth or Consequences: VERITY

Verity, like other Colleen Hoover adaptations, is a twisty melodrama with the dynamics so heightened you get a little dizzy from the altitude sickness. But somehow taking the emphasis off of damaged lovers’ romances, like in It Ends with Us or Regretting You, and into a more straightforward sexy thriller makes for a more effective result. The long simmering tensions bubbling up into straight-faced delirium make sense in this context. It also gives its cast something to hide. This works better to subsume the wildest twists behind doubts and deceptions until the last possible moment. Dakota Johnson stars as a young author hired to sign a non-disclosure agreement and help a troubled bestselling novelist finish her popular series. Anne Hathaway plays the wealthy writer in a deceptive double role in slippery flashbacks and a struggling present. Josh Hartnett is her husband, a nice, supportive guy. Is that suspicious in a movie like this? Johnson moves into their home to sort through outlines and notes and, no surprise, starts formulating her own opinions about the couple’s dynamic as she’s learns about their past and gets entangled in their futures. 

The material makes good use of its cast’s strengths. Johnson, who here has a fine inquisitive blankness to her “resting bored face,” spends most of the movie very slowly reading a secret manuscript that may be a hidden confession to Terrible Deeds, and then wandering the mansion talking to its inhabitants. That each chapter ends on shocking revelations does little to speed her to the end. It’s a sensible chapter a day for this one, the better to string the movie along. It gives Hathaway time to play a wide range of modes, from fresh flirt, to postpartum psychosis, to wounded wife. And Hartnett keeps his chemistry with each woman on a low boil to keep you guessing about his ultimate goal. That the movie is self-consciously playing with the truth and perspective, from the title on down, makes it the kind of smart that people who don’t usually think too hard will find provocative. The rest of us can just vibe with the smooth surfaces’ appeal coaxed along by workmanlike direction and a screenplay that has just the right balance of dread and silliness. From the pretty people to the 80’s-style fonts to the lumbering ominous pace to the trip-wire twists to the fact that all of the bestselling author’s books are designed to look exactly like Hoover’s, it’s a pleasantly unpleasant pulp. 

Down and Out: DIGGER

And here I thought the one bright spot of the end of the world would be respite from having to hear about the ghoulish billionaires and waxworks politicians causing it. What Digger supposes is we’d still be telling their story in the dark ages to come. It’s meant to be funny. Sometimes it is. It’s also a nightmare. Writer-director Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s work has always played best as dark comedy, despite generally wearing the clothes of serious dramatic art. What is the grim survivalist revenge picture The Revenant if not a bleakly funny pile-on of insult and injury in stunning snowy western landscapes? Or how about the misrerabilist everything-is-connected globalism drama Babel? Its ice-cold framing of overheated dramatic twists has a bleary pile-up of tragedy that’s by turns moving and absurd. It stands to reason his Birdman, the most transparently comedic of his films, is his only Oscar Best Picture, what with its self-consciously showbiz showy one-take gimmick swirling around chewy monologues in the mouths of actors playing actors behind the scenes of a play. His latest is a bit of all of the above, mixed with a Yorgos Lanthimos straight-faced cynicism in the face of fish-eyed weirdness and a Wes Anderson conscious artifice and precisely ornate production design in a nesting doll narrative about narrative. 

It stars Tom Cruise, made more believably his mid-60s age with a dusting of makeup effects, as Digger, a tyrannical oil executive whose life is upended when he learns his drilling has broken off a chunk of glacier the size of Pittsburgh. Said iceberg is in a fast current on a collision course with the European coast. Disaster will ensue. The end of the world, even. The film quickly involves the United States’ government, as embodied by a tottering, quick-tempered, narcissistic president (John Goodman) and his staff of toadies and yes men, including a whimpering Vice President (Michael Stuhlbarg), snarling military men, and a pastor, all fervently praying with nationalistic fervor. The point is clear. There’s a toxic blend of corporate, religious, and political corruption gassing each other up and midwifing the apocalypse. It’s what Naomi Klein’s latest book calls End Times Fascism, and Iñárritu’s on the case. He’s never a subtle director, and here the stylistic pyrotechnics and thematic points alike are blasted out with a loud lack of subtlety. All the subtext is buried about half an inch deep at best until scene after scene dusts it off and presents it for our double-underlined awareness. And then (here I’ll be freely discussing what the film takes a half an hour to reveal, so reader beware) it’s revealed that we’re many years after the events in question, and we’re watching tech rehearsal for an improbably technically elaborate stage show revival of a play called Fossil Fools. It’s fools all the way down.

The movie’s a collection of good scenes that never quite cohere. The pale, filmic framing and layered artifice from Emmanuel Lubezki remains beguiling throughout. The actors storm and rage and flail in convincing satiric modes bolstered by thundering dialogue. (The supporting cast also includes Sandra Hüller and Riz Ahmed and Jesse Plemons; it’s a whole movie of scene-stealers given the material to fill their time well.) But the cumulative effect is somehow both too complicated and too obvious to support the architecture around it. We’re placed at a remove both from the story in the story and the frame story. The play never really makes sense as a production, and it’s difficult to see why it appeals to the audience gathering to watch it. Nor do we have enough to understand the people putting on the play—they’re more stock type like Director and Producer and Actor. And being stuck in the theater with them gives us a cramped view of a wider world. It’s a hermetic, caustically angry, omnidirectional cynical movie. That it surges to life on the back of its committed cast and aesthetic curlicues makes it watchable and fascinating, even if never entirely successful. It’s perhaps best viewed as a star text for Cruise, who is, after all, playing his first new character in nearly a decade. He’s both an earnest actor fumbling through backstage family drama—a missing daughter, no less!—and a bloviating deep-fried billionaire trapped in his own mausoleum-like mansion where the only thing his wealth has earned him is isolation and futility. It'll take a dissertation to disentangle all those threads. It’s a movie where you might think appreciating the effortful artistry on display is almost enough to recommend sitting through it. 

After Hours: RESIDENT EVIL

Zach Cregger knows how to communicate a character thinking under pressure. He builds sequences to frame tightening suspense around a figure nervously assessing surroundings and accumulating quick observations. The camera moves with their attention, the editing allowing us to think alongside them. One plus one equals two. We’re drawn into their plight because we’re adding it up, too. The mystery basement and rental confusion of Barbarian and the eerie class disappearance of Weapons are great spaces and dynamics to build his twisty, back-and-forth chronologies that allow revelations to fall into place with tight, satisfying turns. His latest is the fourth attempt to make a live action version of the Resident Evil survival horror zombie video games, following the Milla Jovovich action franchise, a one-off creepy-house reboot, and a one-season Netflix show. Turns out Cregger’s brand of horror filmmaking is perfect for reimagining this world for cinema. He’s consistently demonstrated a light touch, a clever structure, a human sense of peril and nervous laughter. Combined with the active mind behind the framing and pacing, it makes for an involving sense of escalating dread. This ends up being his most narratively straightforward, proceeding in a straight chronological line with one complication following another. 

Our lead is a hospital courier (Austin Abrams) on an overtime run taking a refrigerated bag to the next town over. It’s dangerous enough that it’s a dark and snowy night and the route takes him down a winding rural road. But he’ll soon find out he’s headed straight into a zombie outbreak. We move from the side of the road, to an isolated farmhouse, and onward. A tight focus on a sympathetic protagonist’s chain of thinking and strategizing gives it a constant forward momentum. How’s he going to get out of this one? Each variable slides into place, solving one problem and creating another. Cregger pulls off a kind of magic trick here. It’s a movie that’s so clearly indebted to the process of working level by level through a video game. Cregger even pulls off some first-person shots that flow perfectly into Dariusz Wolski’s fluid cinematography. So although it’s wearing its origins so obviously, it’s also so clearly a movie, with a cinematic sense of pacing and spacing, and a close-up interest in the character whose mind is puzzling through these problems. It delights in performances—from the lead through as fine a collection of one-scene wonders as you’d ever want to see—and in a fun procession of jumping surprises and honest laughs. It’s as likely to startle with a sudden appearance of a monster as it is to find humor in its lead’s stammering disbelief. It adds up to a fast, fun survival story with suitably satisfying cinematic tricks. It’s all technique, but what great technique! 

Have Not: THE UPRISING

There was a good decade where Paul Greengrass was among the most exciting mainstream directors working. He followed up an early career spent in documentaries and British television with some electrifying feature films. He brought a jumpy handheld aesthetic and docudrama realism to overlapping dialogue, matter-of-fact procedure, and intense emotional specificity. He made fact-based re-enactments with propulsive thriller mechanics that shook with a sense of political outrage, showing us an English massacre of Irish protestors in Bloody Sunday, or a hijacked plane on 9/11 in United 93. He added to the realism of his look and tone by casting a mixture of professional actors and amateurs whose day jobs were the roles they portrayed. These are overwhelming effective movies. In another excellent effort he dramatized the takeover of a freighter by pirates, and the daring rescue of the crew, in Captain Phillips, building to star Tom Hanks’ finest few minutes of acting as he decompresses from the trauma. Greengrass also built Matt Damon’s great Bourne franchise, helming three of his four outings as the amnesiac spy trying to piece back together the conspiracy in which he’s a central victim. As writer-director, Greengrass could always be counted on to make films with verisimilitude and direct political engagement. His next group of movies—dreary mass shooting drama 22 July, fine western News of the World, and solid real-life disaster movie The Last Bus—recaptured that magic incompletely. They weren’t without their lesser strengths, but they were movies somehow outside the zeitgeist. 

It’s nice to find that his latest, The Uprising, finds him returning to the appeal of his earlier films, transplanting his aesthetic and thematic concerns to the late Middle Ages for a recounting of the 1381 peasants’ revolt. It’s transparently a movie with modern resonance, with snarling upper class entitlement, encroaching authoritarianism, and fractured political expectation. Is it any wonder he’d be drawn to a movie about a post-plague world stumbling toward economic collapse exacerbated by widening inequality? He films the muddy protestors with bobbing over-the-shoulder following shots and rushing-to-keep-up traveling takes, whip-pans, and snap-zooms. Andrew Garfield plays a humble ploughman who semi-accidentally kicks off the uprising after resisting the onerous new taxes imposed by young tyrant King Richard II (Woody Norman). There are terrific scenes of the downtrodden treading toward London in long lines of protest. They rhyme interestingly with Bloody Sunday’s doomed march, and echo across time when this uprising also reaches a violent conclusion. The movie’s full of character actors young and old (Tom Hollander, Jamie Bell, Cosmo Jarvis, Jonny Lee Miller, Katherine Waterson, and so on) playing period dress-up, and spouting off dialogue that’s largely expositional. The movie remains frustratingly surface-level in this way. It’s all posing picture book history with all the surface grit and none of the characterization that would really make it grow beyond the obvious. Though it nonetheless has effective sequences throughout, it puts them between tedium and obviousness. It also undercuts a fine dreary ending with an epilogue that feels like wishful thinking (and overtly modern thinking) tacked on after the fact. The result is a movie with everything in place for success and then it just slowly deflates instead. I’m still looking forward to the next great Paul Greengrass movie. 

The Watchers: BUDDY and TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA

Two new horror pictures play like media studies seminars. That they manage to be both archly artificial genre commentary and functional entertainments makes for a fun time at the movies. Take Buddy, for instance. It has a great premise. What if there was an episode of Barney where the kid characters start to suspect Barney is a murderer? I can imagine a lot of ways for this hook to go awry. But there’s a total aesthetic commitment to the bit that makes the movie. It plays as a loop of episodes, squared-off, shot-on-video, late-90’s in look and feel. Everything from the primary-color sets, simple melodies, and vintage fashions down to the Comic Sans credits is just right. Buddy is a seemingly affable big orange unicorn mascot, living in a clubhouse on an astroturf soundstage. There he sings songs with and dispenses advice for a small group of kids. There’s a talking mailbox, a bunny in overalls, a nurse, a postman, and a googly-eyed train car. So far so normally absurd. That Buddy’s a murderer slowly reveals itself over the first episode, each subsequent entry becoming more deranged as the kids have to fight back and try to escape. The convincing mix of the form and content sells the curdled nostalgia at its core. 

It becomes a movie about the hidden abuses lurking beneath seemingly innocent programming, an exploded metaphor about what it feels like to watch an old show with fresh knowledge about behind-the-scenes nastiness. (Anyone successfully get through rewatching any random 20-year-old episode of a Nickelodeon sitcom since the documentary about creepy behavior toward those child stars?) The movie’s total absorption in its look and tone, like a nightmare you’d have after falling asleep on the couch with the TV on in the middle of the night, makes sense as the work of writer-director Casper Kelly. You might remember his short film Too Many Cooks, which was a viral sensation in 2014. That was a pitch perfect parody of 80s family sitcom theme songs that went on and on, mutating genres until it broke through the fourth wall into a slasher picture that finally collapsed in existential dread and apocalyptic context collapse. Buddy is a feature length version of the same impulse, stretched out with a few choice intentional swerves out of the style to create some breathing room, but always returning to the chamber of absurdity where laughs of incredulity accompany each splash of blood. 

Writer-director Jane Schoenbrun’s latest, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, is a similar hall of horror mirrors, a long self-reflexive trance state. It’s also about what it’s like to like horror movies, even, and especially, bad ones. It understands the strange formative psychic tremors that the right movie at the right time has on one’s sense of self. Star Hannah Einbinder plays a young director tasked with remaking a problematic cult slasher classic: Camp Miasma. Like the Friday the 13th franchise with a soupçon of Sleepaway Camp, it has a gender-bending villain named Little Death who perpetually wakes up from beneath the lake and goes on a killing spree. Einbinder’s earnest, awkward filmmaker is told to bring the dormant franchise’s views on gender up to date. Flush with an idea, she travels to find the reclusive star of the original (Gillian Anderson with an imperious honey-fried accent) in hopes of talking her into appearing in the reboot. The older woman lives at the abandoned summer camp that was the movie’s filming location. Now, in a matte-painting winter in the middle of nowhere, they have a tense meeting of increasingly entangled psychosexual conversation and bodily awareness. 

In the film’s centerpiece of reflexivity, the two have a discussion about gender, identity, perspective—and sex and violence, or, as the actress says, “flesh and fluids”—before and after screening the original picture. It becomes a film within a film that then further abstracts into muddled memories and flashbacks and sequences. Some feel authentically 80s in their scuzzy graininess. Others get slippery with anachronisms, half-remembered impressions rich with emotional baggage. They embody how horror fans toggle their identification between victim and predator, the penetrated and the perpetrator. If it all sounds artsy and academic, so it is. But it’s also so physical and fraught in its tensions between its leads that it’s hard to shake its dark undertow of confusion and discovery. It’s also constantly winking with meta asides, puncturing but not deflating the heavy mood. If you saw Schoenbrun’s other films you’re familiar with this sense of one’s identity tangled up in the media they consume. In We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, a vulnerable teenage girl gets lost in a spiral of internet influence. In I Saw the TV Glow, lonely teenagers get lost in the lore of a cult series that connects them. Another allegory of displacement and discovery, this new film is their broadest and narrowest, an intimate exposure and disclosure between two women desperate to filter the voids in their lives through the art that shapes them and drives them to new insights into their minds and bodies. 

Spirits Unlocked: INSIDIOUS: OUT OF THE FURTHER

James Wan’s Insidious is one of the great jump scare horror movies. It’s a haunting that leaps out and rattles you with sudden appearances and over-cranked sound design. Some people run down the very idea of a good jolt in a horror picture, calling it cheap and easy way to spike an audience’s attention. But, like all cinema techniques, it’s all in how you deploy it. Compare, for instance, how scary that movie is with how boring its sequels are. It takes a shivery execution and drains it of novelty and fright. It doesn’t help that the premise—a shadowy netherworld called “the further” where demons and spirits congregate hoping to be let into our world, and the living people who can travel there and back again—usually ends up in pretty dull climactic sequences. A sympathetic character wanders what’s essentially a black box theater with a fog machine pumping away off screen. They repeatedly scream the name of the person they’re saving while waving an old-timey lantern. Sometimes ghouls shamble forward and claw at them. It’s all a bit silly, and a bit empty. And this is how four whole sequels have attempted to resolve some standard-issue hauntings! At least the new one, Insidious: Out of the Further, finally comes up with something neat to do with the idea again. 

Writer-director Jacob Chase, new to the series, makes the early going merely a pretty good version of what these movies have done before. A single mom (Amelia Eve) is haunted by these spooky visions and hopes to stop them, and protect her daughter (Island Austin), before she goes totally off the deep end. She’s haunted not just by the spectral beings, but by the memories of her mother (Laura Hall) and her apparent psychotic break twenty years earlier. A psychic tells our lead she has a special gift that’s drawing unwanted ghostly attention. She can bring objects and spirits between these planes of existence and an evil ghost hopes to use her as a conduit to raise his dead acolytes. That’s good stuff! And gives a neat opening for reliable series regular Lin Shaye to reemerge as a spirited guide. (It’s always fun to see a woman above a certain age holding down a horror franchise.) The variables in play give the climax some earthier stakes and the emotional hook of mothers and daughters reconciling across generations and between life and death is nicely done. That our lead’s career in dentistry leads to some skin-crawling tooth business is just an added bonus on the tensions at play. It all adds up to a sixth Insidious that’s easily the best of the series since the original—small praise, perhaps, but a nice surprise, too.